Dear President Obama:
As current and former professional interrogators, interviewers, and intelligence officials who support the release of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s (SSCI) study of the CIA’s post-9/11 rendition, detention, and interrogation program, we welcome your public support for declassification of the study. We write today because we are concerned about reports that your CIA Director, John Brennan, is coordinating with the architects of the CIA’s so-called “enhanced interrogation” program – a program you ended – to mount a defense of the program in response to release of the report.
The CIA’s program prompted a public discussion about whether these “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs) produced reliable information. Some former government officials who authorized the CIA’s program after 9/11 claim that it helped disrupt terrorist plots, save lives, and even locate Osama Bin Laden. While some of the particular claims of success have been disproven by publicly available information, the broader assertion that the EIT program was effective is based on classified information unavailable to the public.
